Well, I'm Back
Got in just before four a.m.
Since I am unable to sleep much past dawn no matter when I go to bed, I am soggy to the point of incoherence today, so I'm doing the sorts of things one does which require labor and no brain. (No list of boring chores follows.)
I left off Monday, anticipating the gathering at "fish." Shortly after I closed up the laptop, Cally Soukup, who is such a fun travel companion, said that K of Minnehaha invited us over for a tour of the new house (wow, what a great place!) and of the Minnehaha Falls. We took off instanter, so we could get in this visit before fish.
K. turns out to be exactly the kind of guide I like best--knowing the history of a given place. As an added bonus, she also knows plants. (I was astonished to discover, for example, that there are weed trees. If a thing is green and gives shade, I've got a Tolkienian attitude toward it; I hate palm trees as they are boring to look at and give no shade) The falls were at their thundering best due to the surging waters all across the region--my pictures show many overflowing river banks.
"Fish" turned out to be the upper room of an excellent Japanese restaurant, which specializes in sushi. They had a delicious bento for those of us who don't do sushi. It was so crowded (maybe forty there?) that conversation was minimal, and anyway, we could only stay for forty-five minutes, as we still had to get down to Osceola, Iowa, for me to make my homebound connection.
Guided by my iPhone GPS, we made it there with time to spare . . . as it turned out, over three hours to spare. Cally took off for home (she womanfully drove several hundred miles out of her way to help me out, a generous act that I hope someday I can repay) and as the sun was vanishing slowly and I knew there would be no exercise for another two days, I took off for a hike around the town.
I love small towns, and scattered houses in no discernible pattern, build in architectural styles ranging from mid-1800s to the fifties or so. The station looked like it had been around for most of the twentieth century, a few modern touches added, like a Kwik-Ticket kiosk, but the iron-work grill, the oval scoured into the entry step from decades of shoes, were just as they'd been.
I worked hard on the trip back, intermittently admiring the spectacular scenery. (Not much animal sighting this trip--I missed the herd of wild mustangs galloping alongside the train the last morning, on the other side)
I am beginning to process the things I observed, and learned. Highlight: getting a chance to visit with many of the Scribblees, some of whom are reuniting for occasional critique sessions. There simply was not enough time for writing conversations of any kind--either those that included me, or those I listened to as others, used to a longterm dynamic, conversed.
I also reflected on the nature of Things, which can be extended to interactions. You know, the value of Things being so very relative. You can cherish a scrap of paper that everyone else considers a grubby scrawl, but it was given you by someone you love. Or maybe the name "John Keats" appears at the bottom, and suddenly its worth alters all out of proportion to the meaning it holds for you.
Such can be with interactions: I can remember, and consider, an interaction for years, well aware that my conversational partner will not remember the moment past the next day, judging from how utterly they had forgotten our last. ("We did? You were here? Oh, that had totally slipped my mind!")
Or maybe that is the dork legacy, because people reminisced about every remembered scrap of Mike Ford's interactions--and well worth remembering they were. I was thinking about the ineffable nature of genius as I read Keats' letters on my return journey. You forget he died before he reached twenty-five. What a mind! Then I had to go back and reread the sharp observations T.S. Eliot made about Keats and Shelley in his litcrit booklet.
I discovered that I need to learn how to use the Kindle better, as I couldn't navigate around, and making notes was tedious. I longed for a paper book; my Keats letters, bought used in the seventies, is falling apart. Time for a new.
On the journey out, with all those uninterrupted hours, I did get through Philip Bobbit's The Shield of Achilles at last. His gods-eye view of the evolution of the market-state was fascinating, and convincing, even if I found his historical b.g. a tad too tidy, and too arbitrary. (Castlereagh? Really? What about Talleyrand and his vision of Europe as a modern entity at the peace of Amiens, which didn't even get a mention?)
Would anyone like to see some of my trip pix? I am not a good photographer, and have very few of people; those I took, while trying to be unobtrusive, turned out uniformly bad. But I got some pleasant nature shots.
Since I am unable to sleep much past dawn no matter when I go to bed, I am soggy to the point of incoherence today, so I'm doing the sorts of things one does which require labor and no brain. (No list of boring chores follows.)
I left off Monday, anticipating the gathering at "fish." Shortly after I closed up the laptop, Cally Soukup, who is such a fun travel companion, said that K of Minnehaha invited us over for a tour of the new house (wow, what a great place!) and of the Minnehaha Falls. We took off instanter, so we could get in this visit before fish.
K. turns out to be exactly the kind of guide I like best--knowing the history of a given place. As an added bonus, she also knows plants. (I was astonished to discover, for example, that there are weed trees. If a thing is green and gives shade, I've got a Tolkienian attitude toward it; I hate palm trees as they are boring to look at and give no shade) The falls were at their thundering best due to the surging waters all across the region--my pictures show many overflowing river banks.
"Fish" turned out to be the upper room of an excellent Japanese restaurant, which specializes in sushi. They had a delicious bento for those of us who don't do sushi. It was so crowded (maybe forty there?) that conversation was minimal, and anyway, we could only stay for forty-five minutes, as we still had to get down to Osceola, Iowa, for me to make my homebound connection.
Guided by my iPhone GPS, we made it there with time to spare . . . as it turned out, over three hours to spare. Cally took off for home (she womanfully drove several hundred miles out of her way to help me out, a generous act that I hope someday I can repay) and as the sun was vanishing slowly and I knew there would be no exercise for another two days, I took off for a hike around the town.
I love small towns, and scattered houses in no discernible pattern, build in architectural styles ranging from mid-1800s to the fifties or so. The station looked like it had been around for most of the twentieth century, a few modern touches added, like a Kwik-Ticket kiosk, but the iron-work grill, the oval scoured into the entry step from decades of shoes, were just as they'd been.
I worked hard on the trip back, intermittently admiring the spectacular scenery. (Not much animal sighting this trip--I missed the herd of wild mustangs galloping alongside the train the last morning, on the other side)
I am beginning to process the things I observed, and learned. Highlight: getting a chance to visit with many of the Scribblees, some of whom are reuniting for occasional critique sessions. There simply was not enough time for writing conversations of any kind--either those that included me, or those I listened to as others, used to a longterm dynamic, conversed.
I also reflected on the nature of Things, which can be extended to interactions. You know, the value of Things being so very relative. You can cherish a scrap of paper that everyone else considers a grubby scrawl, but it was given you by someone you love. Or maybe the name "John Keats" appears at the bottom, and suddenly its worth alters all out of proportion to the meaning it holds for you.
Such can be with interactions: I can remember, and consider, an interaction for years, well aware that my conversational partner will not remember the moment past the next day, judging from how utterly they had forgotten our last. ("We did? You were here? Oh, that had totally slipped my mind!")
Or maybe that is the dork legacy, because people reminisced about every remembered scrap of Mike Ford's interactions--and well worth remembering they were. I was thinking about the ineffable nature of genius as I read Keats' letters on my return journey. You forget he died before he reached twenty-five. What a mind! Then I had to go back and reread the sharp observations T.S. Eliot made about Keats and Shelley in his litcrit booklet.
I discovered that I need to learn how to use the Kindle better, as I couldn't navigate around, and making notes was tedious. I longed for a paper book; my Keats letters, bought used in the seventies, is falling apart. Time for a new.
On the journey out, with all those uninterrupted hours, I did get through Philip Bobbit's The Shield of Achilles at last. His gods-eye view of the evolution of the market-state was fascinating, and convincing, even if I found his historical b.g. a tad too tidy, and too arbitrary. (Castlereagh? Really? What about Talleyrand and his vision of Europe as a modern entity at the peace of Amiens, which didn't even get a mention?)
Would anyone like to see some of my trip pix? I am not a good photographer, and have very few of people; those I took, while trying to be unobtrusive, turned out uniformly bad. But I got some pleasant nature shots.